470 Viscount Burnham [Jan. 27, 



without offence, that I believe the standard of veracity to be higher 

 among journalists than in most other categories of men, certainly 

 more than on the political platform or in economic controversies. 

 In the higher altitudes this favourable comparison has applied even 

 to religious questions of orthodoxy and other " doxy." Take an 

 actual example and suppose that at the same time the economic 

 problem of unemployment is being discussed in the public press and 

 on the public platform. The comparison goes deep down to the 

 foundations of national and international life. In the columns of the 

 newspaper the discussion would be carried on in freedom and in truth. 

 Those who addressed the editor can either write over their own names 

 •or, as a protection against the popular terrorism of the black list and 

 the branch meeting, over initials or a pseudonym, so that they can speak 

 without fear of reprisals the thing that is in them. Finally, in the 

 leading article which collates the correspondence and draws out its 

 conclusion there would be combined the views of a privy council of 

 experienced journalists, not acting under pressure or with a notice to 

 quit before their eyes. At worst as a shield and buckler, such combatants 

 have professional agreements to ensure their status. On the platform, 

 on the other hand, most speakers are candidates for election or 

 re-election to some public authority, ranging in importance from 

 Parliament to the parish council, or they are office-holders in some 

 trade society or industrial organisation. When they speak they have 

 in their mind's eye a writ of return on the table, or more often, and 

 more forcibly, a writ of ejectment to keep them within the law. 

 " Mass is lord," as George Meredith says, and mass law is a hard 

 law. They are one and all delegates for somebody or another, and 

 as delegates, especially on questions of wages and hours, they are 

 bound by their instructions or their pledges or by both. Their 

 boasted freedom is freedom to speak no doubt, but to speak only 

 according to orders. They are like the representatives of a Govern- 

 ment Department in a Legislative Assembly. It is just this power 

 of representing and protecting minorities, and especially small 

 minorities, which is the especial duty and peculiar function of the 

 newspaper press. A great constitutional historian has said that the 

 supreme virtue of our Parliamentary procedure was that it secured 

 and defended the rights of minorities. It does so pro forma now, but 

 I doubt if it does so in fact except in the House of Lords, and then 

 only within the limits of our own constitutional impotence. It is 

 only the newspaper press that in tumultuary and storm-ridden days 

 can afford minorities — what Lord Erskine called in 1792 " the last 

 liberty which subjects have been able to wrest from the Crown." 

 Such is the best that can be said for the British Press, the chiefest 

 glory which the best of it can still claim for its colours. 



AVe have behind us a long history dating from the Postboys and 

 the Courants of the early years of the 18th Century. The first daily 

 newspaper was The Post Boy, published in London in 1C95, and 



